Goodbye to Berlin to Cabaret Adaptation and Politi, an essay fiction | FictionPress Goodbye to Berlin to Cabaret Adaptation and Politi The changes between Christopher Isherwood's 'Goodbye to Berlin' and its stage/cinema adaptations including Fosse's 'Cabaret'. Rated: Fiction M - English - Words: 4,503 - Published: 11/7/2008 - Status: Complete - id: 2593276 + - Full 3/4 1/2 Expand Tighten "GOODBYE TO BERLIN" INTRODUCTION GOODBYE TO BERLIN TO CABARET- A 33 YEARS OF TRANSFORMATION 'Goodbye to Berlin' is an episodic short novel with six parts, or rather a collection of six short stories, dealing with Isherwood's own experiences in Berlin between 1930 and 1933, at the ending of the Weimar Era and the rise of the Nazis in a semi-autobiographical manner. It published in 1939 starting the legend ended with the musical Hollywood production 'Cabaret' (Fosse, 1972).

'Goodbye to Berlin', especially 'Sally Bowles' which was first published separately in 1937 were soon became very famous, both because it is an important reference to the first years of Nazi Party's Rising and the tension of the environment with real characters and a different observer then what people can find in history books, and also because it is a reference of the homosexual capital of the world, with personal accounts –thought transformed into other characters to save the author from the charges that may arise in England or Berlin, where homosexuality was still illegal-. 'Goodbye to Berlin' first inspired a play in 1951; 'I am a Camera' which was directed by John Van Druten, which in turn became a movie under the same title in 1955. But the real success of the stories wasn't until the Broadway version in 1966, by John Kander and Fred Ebb, which resulted into the famous, award-winning musical movie 'Cabaret' by Bob Fosse in 1972, with the 'divinely decadent' Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles.

Between these five versions, there is a big change regarding first the medium and the style of the stories, then regarding the characters –either they appear in the story or not, their sexuality, their race and the role they play in the story-line and the story itself-. But it is impossible to suggest that all these changes were realized solely because of the change of the medium the story is narrated with. The main reason to these transformations is the loose narrative structure Isherwood used in his book. The six stories –or parts- share same logistics, some common characters and of course Isherwood as the observer and the main character, but in spite all that, turning the book into a script with a proper structure of beginning, development and an ending requires some transformation in the stories. 2. THE CHARACTERS HERR ISSYVOO Christopher Isherwood doesn't hide that he is mainly writing his own experiences by naming the main character as himself; Christopher Isherwood in 'Goodbye to Berlin', He also uses the first person narration to state that fact. The main character in the stories is Christopher Isherwood, himself, or his 'Alter-Ego' as Hilton Als puts it.

But Isherwood is not a typical novel hero, he states himself that he is not the 'real story', that he is mainly an observer who records the instances happening around him and he uses himself solely as a classical narrator in an Ancient Greek play, which doesn't involve into the story, but only comments and hints what is going to happen between the stages. As he says himself in the beginning of the book: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." It is not only himself who thinks of his character as a camera, but a lot of critics like Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Hardwick characterize his work as journalistic and objective . There are some critics, like Jerry Stratton 4who believes his powers to transmit a story is better than of a camera, because he enlightens the details the camera cannot reveal. He is beyond a camera in showing the atmosphere and beliefs of Pre-Nazi Germany, which makes the book merit his reputation.

But while transferring the book into a play or into a movie, this characteristic of Isherwood becomes a big obstacle. The easiest solution to this problem is to raise the level of the most beloved and outstanding character of the novel; Sally Bowles' role into the main character. The romance between Sally Bowles and Christopher Isherwood that first appeared in the musical 'I Am a Camera' is the result of this adjustment and the need of a major love affair in a main-stream story. This also solved the problem of Christopher Isherwood's being merely an observer. In the book, the only character that the readers cannot completely know is Isherwood, as he never describes himself or his personal traits and doesn't talk much about his own personal life, but only talks about himself in the context of the interesting people he met. Hence the reader can only see his character traits through the dialogues that he forms with these acquaintances. The character of Christopher Isherwood is more of a mystery in the way he portrayed in the book, but if one keeps him that way in a stage production or in a film, he cannot even have a proper minor character in his hands, let alone the protagonist of the film.

The romance between him and Sally and also the secret swing with Maximilian provides Christopher Isherwood with more depth that the book granted him to have. Another constant change in the character of Christopher Isherwood is his race. With varied names; Christopher Isherwood in the film and the play 'I am a Camera', Cliff Bradshaw in the stage version of the musical 'Cabaret' and Brian Roberts in the film 'Cabaret', his nationality also changes. In the stage version of 'Cabaret', Cliff Bradshaw is an American and turned back to be an Englishman in the film version. This variation can be to make the American audience closer to the character and was left out in the film version, because they made Sally Bowles American this time. We can see from these changes that they believed the American main-stream audience, which is the main target the productions aim for, to sympathize with an American more than with an English character. SALLY BOWLES The character of Sally Bowles is beyond doubt the most famous and beloved character of the book. There isn't of course only one reason for this to happen; in fact all of her characteristics emerge together and make this rather annoying, high-maintenance woman turned into an eccentric but lovely character.

The most important part of Sally Bowles which made her so famous, even though not necessarily the way she –Jean Ross- would have wanted it, is that she plays a persona, rather then being herself. Christopher Isherwood writes about this side of Jean in 'Christopher and His Kind' as that: "… I can see that she was full of fun and quite conscious of herself as a comic character. Once, a few years later in London, she told Christopher that she was going over to Ostende for the weekend. He asked, 'Why on earth-?' She answered, with her brilliant grin: 'So I can come back here and be the Woman from Ostende'.

" Isherwood also talks about the difficulty to transfer this aspect of Jean to Sally, because he thinks that 'if a fiction character is allowed to play-act so self-consciously, there is a danger that the mask may stick to its face…' But though, Isherwood shows us the playfulness in Sally and mainly her act as a 'decadent lady' like she puts it, but with events like Klaus' break-up with her and the abortion she had to face, the readers can feel more then a decadent cabaret singer, a gold-digger or an adventurer –or all of them-. The character then appeals to a lot of different likings, an adventurer, and crazy, one may say, a woman whose adventures the readers can enjoy and a scared 20 year old girl who doesn't know that much about the world as she herself likes to believe, for whom the reader can have sympathy. This is the case for the written form. When transformed to the stage or to the cinema, Sally Bowles is an even greater role which is perfect for the stage.

She is extravagant in every way; her whole appearance – from the way she dresses to the color she chooses for her fingernails, the over-cheery way she talks, the way she constantly flirts with every man around…. Especially in the film 'Cabaret', Liza Minelli's performance of Sally Bowles creates a dynamic, over the top character which even influences the fashions of the day with her weird choice on clothing, to her disgusting prairie oysters. The role she plays which once intimidated Christopher Isherwood is much more exaggerated in the film and although she still have some moments or true openings in which she puts away her mask, she is more of a 'comic character' as Isherwood puts it, then a real woman. The role she plays puts her into the main character of the film, even though one may suggest that the main character still is Brian Roberts, he is far more passive then Sally Bowles and she outshines his importance in the film in every scene. SIDE CHARACTERS In the book as we have a lot of different characters belonging to different status, race and background, and because Christopher Isherwood is determined to stay as objective as possible, the reader never has to stick with one perspective.

But this approach is a hard-one to establish in a script, as it must have one protagonist whose point-of-view the audience would follow. To make different perspectives of the current situation in Berlin in the 30's possible, Bob Fosse and John Van Druten creates side-stories with minor characters of the novel. This is also because of the required integration to write a script out of the book and to better use the characters that Isherwood portrays. In the play of 'I am a Camera', the side story is Nathalia Landauer's plan of marrying a young and wealthy Jew which is imperiled by the Anti-Semitist atmosphere of Berlin and Germany. Joe Masteroff didn't include this story in the musical 'Cabaret', but created a similar, if not more dangerous, love affair between Christopher Isherwood's tenant-lady Fräulein Schneider and a Jewish fruit-shop owner Herr Schultz, which ended with Fräulein Scheider breaking up the engagement. When the film version of 'Cabaret' was realized, Bob Fosse returned to the love affair of Nathalia Landauer and changed her suitor to a poor Jew who impersonates to be a Christian.

Although these parts can vary from one version to another, we can see that the reasons behind these transformations stays the same and they act to better portray the Jewish Front of the Era and also help to clear the story from the accusation of focusing too much on the strangers living in Berlin at the time and ignoring the real habitants –both German and Jew-. 3. SEXUAL POLITICS LEADING THE ADAPTIONS HOMOSEXUALITY OR THE LACK OF IT As mentioned before, 'Goodbye to Berlin' is recollections from the experiences Isherwood lived in Berlin in the course of three years. But there is one important aspect which doesn't allow the readers to experience his whole life in Berlin; his sexual orientation. Because of the fact that homosexuality was still illegal both in England and in Germany –though it was lived more openly in Berlin- he needed to cover his homosexuality and this result him placing himself as another person, like he reveals in his autobiography of the Berlin years; 'Christopher and His Kind' (1976), as his love affair with a German working-class communist, Otto, is recorded as an affair between "an Englishman, Peter Wilkinson, about my own age" and Otto.

In this way, no one could directly accuse him, but the avid readers can still understand his true sexuality. Another way that he gives himself away is how he describes Otto in the novel: "Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is fair and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide, disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true…" The fear of possible accusation also prevented him from telling an account of his stay and acquaintances in 'Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Dr. Magnus Hirschfelds Institut fuer Sexual Wissenschaft), which could be an important account on the gay front of the day, keeping also in mind that it had later destroyed by the Nazis. HOW THE PRODUCTIONS TREATED HOMOSEXUALITY In the stage and film production of 'I Am a Camera', the homosexuality of Christopher Isherwood is completely left over, which is also the case in the musical production of the 'Cabaret'.

This is not only because of the fact that homosexuality was still more or less of a taboo in the fifties, but also because otherwise the love between Sally and Isherwood would be impossible to occur and this would leave the story without a main focus. In the stage production of 'Cabaret', although Cliff Bradshaw is still a heterosexual, the homosexuality is recognized in the decadence of the Cabaret culture, with the Emcee in drag with several other cabaret boys. This is in fact an approach very similar to Christopher Isherwood himself who, instead of stating his true sexual orientation, invents characters to play his part and stay as an observer.

He also tells about "the peasant boys ,in Tiergarten, out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work, …, but the city, …, is cold, cruel and dead." Which implies to the low-class boys selling their bodies in the slams of Berlin, and there is a pretty good chance that the shabby lokal he went to when living with the Nowaks in the novel; Alexander Casino is actually the 'boy bar' he acclaimed to be acquaianted in 'Christopher and His Kind'; The Cosy Corner, because of the fact that The Cosy Corner was in Zossenerstrasse which is very near to the Hallesches Tor where the Nowaks live and they both have 'heavy leather curtain' as a door in the entrance. In the Cosy Corner, the working-class boys sold their bodies and although Isherwood didn't clearly said this for Alexander Casino, he wrote about ' a boy with a round childish face' and 'an elderly, shaven-headed, respectable-looking man' sitting together at a table and the boy laying his hands on the man's knee to 'emphasize his point' .

Like Cabaret, in a time of economical crisis, Berlin is also a place where no one can afford to judge other people's morals. When we came to the film version of 'Cabaret', it's 1972 and the audience is ready to recognize homosexuality in a character, but making Brian Roberts a homosexual would have left the production without a proper plot to advance the story, so he was transformed into a confused bisexual –he said to Sally that he had been with three women, but didn't enjoy either of them, but after they had sex, they thought it was just these women's fault and in the final break-down scene, Brian admitted that he had sex with Maximilian.- In this way, the film isn't depicted any more of its decadence of homosexual culture which was also an important aspect of Berlin in the era and it still has a major love-story to continue the narration. This is the closest production to 'Goodbye to Berlin' in this aspect and one may argue, it has even more sexuality and perversity than the book, because of the difference of the era.

This is also a very important reason, alongside with Liza Minelli's performance and Bob Fosse's brilliant direction, especially of the scenes regarding Nazis, which put the film in the position of the most famous and successful among all the productions and the book. 4. RACIAL POLITICS AND THE NAZI ATMOSPHERE OF BERLIN RACIAL VIOLENCE Although as Isherwood himself later admits in 'Christopher and His Kind' that he was reluctant in telling the account of the pre-Nazi Berlin, he addressed to the issue in several ways in 'Goodbye to Berlin'. He rapports the most detailed account of the Nazi terror through BernhardLandauer, but he also describes some characters with Nazi ideology like Fräulein Mayr and the Nazi doctor at the Ruegen Island and gives general accounts of the daily incidents all through the book and directs to the issue mostly and most severely at the end chapter; 'A Berlin Diary'. His character Bernhard is the most politically active Jew of the novel. But in all the productions, Bernhard is left out, maybe because he wasn't an important character at the book and wasn't as interesting as the other characters.

It was also wiser to choose Nathalia over Bernhard at the sake of the plot, because Nathalia is more open to be transformed as a character and easier to be turned into a real character on stage, whereas Bernhard's character is gloomy and a little bit asocial or frigid. Nathalia's love affair with Fritz Wendel provides the film with racial oppression that Bernhard faced in the book and the scene where the Nazis kill her dog replaces the treads that he repeatedly receives. The daily accounts in the book are often given in the film as cutting through the scene –usually a Cabaret number-. This 'cut-to's provide the audience with the chance to compare the life in the Cabaret and on the streets and creates a judgmental feeling towards the care-free decadent people of the Cabaret. Sally, Brian, along with many other Germans, even the Jews ignored the Nazis for a long time, seeing them as a couple of outrageous youngsters, but this didn't prevent the Nazis from entering into the world of the Cabaret and changed history.

These 'cut-to' scenes accuses the middle-class and high-class people through the Cabaret itself of ignoring the problem ahead and staying inactive, where they could in fact prevent the problem, before it went out of control. Bob Fosse is saying through this structure, that one of the responsible groups of Nazi's actions is the Germans themselves, because they were too much in focus with their lives and their pleasures to truly grasp the problem, and because they didn't act, before the problem got big enough to affect themselves. But we can see at the end of the film that though the world of the Cabaret is a different-one from the reality, it didn't protect their followers from the Nazi politics. 'TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME' The song 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' was first realized in the stage version of the 'Cabaret'. It was a recurring musical piece which emphasizes Nazi's rise to power and how the general German people in Berlin and familiar people around the characters –Fräulein Kost for example- start to line up with the Nazi party. The most dominant scene in this theme is when the song is sung in a beer garden, which also translated into the film version.

Bob Fosse did a brilliant job on directing this scene. This is also the only song sung outside of the stage in the Kit Kat Club and functions as a turning point in the film. Just after Brian and the rich baron Maximilian laughed about keeping Nazis under control, on their way to Maximilian's mansion, they stop at a beer garden and a pension in the woods; 'Waldesruhe' (Forest's Peace), a young boy starts singing 'Tomorrow Belongs to me'. Bob Fosse first shows only the boys face, which is rather pretty and peaceful and there is no doubt that a spectator stranger of the musical play starts to enjoy the peace and gets under the music's and the boy's influence. This is exactly when the camera slides down to the boy and shows us that he is a young Nazi soldier. The scene is like a replica of a turning point scene in almost any of the Hollywood soldier-theme film and in this way, Bob Fosse also comments on the way Hollywood boosts militarism and patriarchy.

The scene is far more disturbing then any other Nazi scene in the movie, because the boy, his voice, the place and the way the scene is directed can only be called as beautiful, and this is the most open comment of Bob Fosse on why so many Germans joined to the Nazi Party in the 30's. He didn't put his own input and views into the film, but this scene is a direct examination by him and passes even Isherwood's examinations in 'Goodbye to Berlin' with a deeper analysis of the German society. The scene let Bob Fosse to show the audience, that after this moment, almost all of the German society 'stand up' to be with the Nazis, and the only person sitting down and resisting the Nazis is a very old man which clearly symbolizes the opposite of 'Tomorrow'. THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD; THE KIT-KAT CLUB The Kit Kat Club, or Lady Windermere doesn't have a lot of exposure in 'Goodbye to Berlin', but it is the center of the story in the stage productions, and although its role seems diminished in the film version of the 'Cabaret', it still has an essential role in the plot.

Bob Fosse uses the Cabaret to create a different world which can comment on the current Berlin and this provides the film with a deeper apprehending and importance of the Nazi environment and the on-going politics of Berlin at the era, more then any other production or the book provide. Aside with some events in the plot, like Nazi's assault to Nathalia, the Cabaret itself shows the audience the advancement of the Nazi force. There is also another way in which Bob Fosse isolates the Kit Kat Club from the rest of the world and the rest of the film; except from 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me', every song in the movie are only sung in the stage of Kit Kat Club and this creates the special place that the club possess in the film and it also secured the real feeling of the rest of the film. Thus, the serious historical events aren't cheapen by the people singing and dancing around in a scene of violence, like most of the conventional Hollywood musical tend to do.

Like the dangerous smirk and the understanding nod of the Master of the Ceremonies at the end of the beer garden scene, the songs and especially the Master of the Ceremonies himself often cuts into the action –or the action is parallel editing with the stage number- to comment on the story plot. The song 'Money Money' comments on the danger of Brian's and Sally's plan with Maximilian, so long with 'Two Girls'. Also some songs are commented through the 'cut to' scenes of Nazi violence. With this dynamic, Bob Fosse uses the Cabaret like a framing device for the whole plot. Master of the Ceremonies' role in this framing is essentially important, as he took the role of Christopher Isherwood himself in pointing out and commenting. His role is more obvious and he truly resembles to the Ancient Greek way of a narrator, not only as a presenter of the Cabaret shows, but also as he constantly gives comments and hints about the plot and the future of Germany. This role of his is most dominant at the end of the film. After Sally sung 'Life is a Cabaret', Bob Fosse shows us that maybe life isn't a cabaret, but the cabaret is life himself.

After Sally got off the stage, the stage lights first shows the Master of Ceremonies and then the light passes through the curtains in addition of a montage sequence of past events in the film and stops at a distorted reflection of the audience, in which we can see that almost all of them became Nazi's. Hence, the place which first ridicules about the Nazis became a Nazi territory itself. The Cabaret ignored the Nazi problem and found it something to kid about, but the Nazis even invaded the Cabaret, which is the life itself, meaning the total dominance of the Nazi force in Germany. The film's ideas about the culpable force of the Nazis is very different from various other films and documentaries about Nazis; of course Hitler and the Nazi Party are to blame, but the German people who didn't see the serious problem ahead and didn't react to it and the ones who fell into their traps are also to blame, according to Bob Fosse. In this way and in a way of focusing on the loose morals of the society; the Cabaret puts 'Cabaret' into the Nazi films.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cabaret - - Goodbye Berlin, Hello Broadway GOODBYE TO BERLIN - HELLO TO BROADWAY "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed " Christopher Isherwood, 1939 Cabaret's place in American musical theatre history begins in 1933 with the Broadway premiere of The Threepenny Opera. Based on John Gay's eighteenth century play The Beggar's Opera, playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill set their version in Victorian London and told the story of the outlaw Mack the Knife in an attempt to send up the political chaos in Germany during the 20s and 30s. Although it was not an instant success, three decades later a musical that "fixed" Isherwood showed how much it owed to this German import.

Cabaret is foremost an adaptation by librettist Joe Masteroff of John Van Druten's play I Am a Camera, itself a dramatisation of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (The Last of Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin), by librettist Joe Masteroff. The actress Lotte Lenya (Kurt Weill's widow) formed the most obvious link between the two productions, having played Jenny in the original The Threepenny Opera and Fraulein Schneider in the original Cabaret in 1966. Lenya's presence in this new show added authenticity for Kander and Ebb, the creators of Cabaret, who wanted to recreate the "feel" of pre-Nazi Berlin. In scoring the show, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb wrote a number of cabaret songs to recapture but not parody the music of the period. "When I wrote Cabaret," recalls Kander, "I went and listened for months to lots of records of German jazz of the 1920s and I forgot about it.

It sort of seeps into your subconscious and comes out in a sort of natural flavour rather than pastiche." For the libretto, Masteroff and director Hal Prince decided to concentrate on a number of Isherwood's characters. Van Druten's play centres mainly on the story of English entertainer Sally Bowles and her failed romances, set against the rise of the Third Reich. "Hal told me right from the beginning," says Masteroff, "that he didn't want this to be a musical about Sally Bowles who, he feels, is the least interesting character in Berlin Stories." Anxiety that Cabaret might become just another "star vehicle" did not bother Bob Fosse's 1972 film version. Although Jay Allen's screenplay leans more to Isherwood than either Masteroff's libretto or Van Druten's play, Fosse makes the Sally Bowles character (an American in the film and played by Liza Minnelli) the focus of the film's dramatic action as she connects the Kit Kat Klub with the Nazi menace. Clifford Bradshaw, the American novelist who arrives in Berlin just as the Nazis' power is growing, is the character that has seen the most change.

When the show was revived for its twentieth anniversary in 1987, with the same director, Hal Prince wanted to confront the issues he had had to leave out of a musical about the Nazis, saying, "in 1966 the show was soft centred". Joe Masteroff explains the situation: In the original stories the character really had no sex. In 1966 our Cliff was heterosexual; in Bob Fosse's film he was bisexual." On account of the 1987 version, he has now become unmistakeably homosexual, and his affair with Sally has no chance of changing his orientation. When she aborts, what may be, his child, she has not sabotaged a lasting romance. But it is the Master of Ceremonies (known as "Emcee") in the Kit Kat Klub that gives Cabaret its own distinctive style. Developed after Masteroff had completed his libretto, this was Hal Prince's own concept and the character was created out of improvised routines between the actor Joel Grey (who originally played Emcee) and the director. Emcee is yet another throwback to The Threepenny Opera.

Although no similar character appears in the Brecht-Weill piece, Emcee's routine provides the setting in which to present cabaret-type songs that comment on the historical and social themes throughout the musical, an effect that Brecht demanded from theatre music. Emcee, in Prince's words, "Represents the Depression. He starts out as a pathetic, self-deluded entertainer who gradually turns into an emblem of the Nazi mentality." Never having been to Germany, Joel Grey relied on Lotte Lenya to tell him what Berlin was like in the 20s and 30s. "if we were doing something in rehearsal that was incorrect in terms of what really happened at the time, she certainly let us know," says Grey. "So it gave everybody a real link, because she had been there." As Emcee increases the menace within his twilight world, so the characters must come to terms with the growing menace of Nazism, in whatever way they can. The use of a Master of Ceremonies as a unifying symbol, a device Cabaret can call its own, is further explored in the musical Chicago.

Bob Fosse, the director of the Cabaret film, presented this vaudeville-style critique on American deca-dence by also having a Master of Ceremonies to introduce each character as a variety act. In Prince's production of Evita, the character of Che acts as a cynical commentator exposing the corrupt Perons. The Engineer in Miss Saigon is the latest incarnation of this technique, with his ambition to be part of the American dream giving a political edge to the tragic story of two lovers from different cultures. For all the debt it owes to The Threepenny Opera, Cabaret has been more influential in making the art of political theatre both more accessible and more popular.

© Stephen Gallagher (Plays International) Christopher Isherwood | Articles | The List Christopher Isherwood 30 Nov 2010 Largely forgotten adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin omits social decay (12) 100min (Park Circus) Made in 1955 this, the first major film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, is largely forgotten, eclipsed by the multi award-winning stage and film musical Cabaret, also adapted from Isherwood’s tales… A Single Man 12 May 2010 Last chance to see Colin Firth grieve his well dressed heart out on the big screen in Tom Ford’s elegant adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel. Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 14-Wed 19 May. A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood and the silver screen 3 Feb 2010 With Tom Ford’s stylish adaptation of A Single Man tipped for Oscar glory, Allan Radcliffe looks into novelist Christopher Isherwood’s enduring relationship with the silver screen.

Think of Christopher Isherwood, and the first image that springs to… A Single Man 1 Feb 2010 (12A) 99min Tom Ford, the fashion industry’s Dorian Gray, adapts Christopher Isherwood’s spare, lyrical study of alienation and loss for his film debut (as director and screenwriter). A Single Man traces a day in the life of George Falconer… From 'Goodbye to Berlin' to I Am a Camera, A History of Cabaret's Journey to the Stage | Playbill By Robert Simonson Apr 11, 2014 John Kander and Joe Masteroff discuss the history of Cabaret and the process of collaborating with Harold Prince while adapting the novel and play into a musical. Christopher Isherwood * Little did novelist Christopher Isherwood know when he published his 1939 novella "Goodbye to Berlin" — a semi-autobiographical account of his own time in Berlin in the 1930s — what an afterlife the book would have. Well, not the book itself, exactly, though "Goodbye to Berlin" remains in print and is certainly still read.

But the characters he created, including the English #cabaret singer Sally Bowles (the surname was borrowed from novelist Paul Bowles), have had a much more vibrant and public life on stage than they have on the page. The novel was first adapted for the stage by British playwright John Van Druten . He called it I Am a Camera and focused on the character of Sally, just one of many figures in Isherwood's stories. The title is taken from the opening line of the novel, which runs, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." When it bowed on Broadway, it was one of Van Druten's biggest successes and helped make its Sally Bowles, Julie Harris , a star. Isherwood himself was impressed by the actress. "Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book," he said, "and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character." Four years later it was made into a film, again starring Harris, which was not a success. That might have been stage triumph enough for any literary work.

But 15 years after I Am a Camera debuted, director-producer Harold Prince saw something more in the story. He acquired the rights to both the Van Druten and Isherwood material, and drafted librettist Joe Masteroff (with whom he had worked on She Loves Me , and who had worked with Harris on his own play The Warm Peninsula) and the relatively unknown composers John Kander and Fred Ebb to create a musical around the story. Prince, Kander recalled, was very much in charge of the show's vision. "Hal invented this piece, you have to understand, and we were thrilled to be asked to be a part of it," Kander told Playbill.com. "The show was developed in Hal's living room. We met over and over and over, talking about what if this happened, what if that happened. Out of all of that talking, music came, narrative came. It all seemed to grow on the same tree. Hal had a lot of physical vision of how he wanted the show to look like. Those meetings were very rich. He had certain things he wanted to do that he told us about." Kander, Ebb and Prince were certain they had hatched a golden idea for a musical.

Others, however, were not so sure. "A lot of people said to us afterwards, 'What on earth are you doing?'," remembered Kander. "But it seemed obvious to us that it was a great idea." John Kander Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN One of the doubters was Masteroff himself. "When we wrote the show, we thought we were taking an enormous chance," the librettist told Playbill.com. "The best we could hope for would be good reviews. Now, that it's so long since the Holocaust, it's difficult to think that when Cabaret was first done in 1966, the Holocaust was only 20 years old, so everyone knew about it. "[The show] has so many things against it," Masteroff continued. "In those days, homosexuality could not be discussed on stage in any way. And then there's a girl who doesn't lead a very noble life and has an abortion. And a story that doesn't end happily for everyone in the cast.

It's not the sort of thing that Broadway musicals were made of back in 1966." The trio devised a structure in which the songs were divided between traditionally delivered musical comedy numbers and presentational songs that were offered in the cabaret of the title, the Kit Kat Klub in Berlin. The latter often slyly commented on the the toxic political culture surrounding the characters. The composer and the librettist worked separately, feeding each other material when they had finished a song or a scene. "We didn't work in the same room," said Masteroff. "Composers and lyricists have their own world. We bookwriters just sit home alone and send our work out into the world." The first song off Kander's piano was Cabaret's famous opener, "Wilkommen." "Fred and I, throughout most of our career, wrote the first thing first," explained Kander. "In the music — even so simple-minded as that opening vamp is — in the music at the beginning of any show there's an element which informs what the rest of the show's going to be." According to Masteroff, one of the things that changed about the show was the title.

"It was originally called Welcome to Berlin," he said, "and many of the women's theatre groups, which were usually most Jewish, said they could never get their groups to go to a show called Welcome to Berlin. So we came up with the name Cabaret." Prince surrounded the musical with a more dark-hued production that Broadway audiences were then accustomed. (This was the era of Hello, Dolly!) A large mirror, instead of a curtain, faced the audience when they entered the theatre. Joel Grey , as the macabre sybaritic Master of Ceremonies, was androgynous and made up in ghoulish white makeup. The cast also included Jill Haworth as Sally; Bert Convy as Cliff, an American writer who teaches English and has an affair with Sally; the Brecht veteran Lotte Lenya as Fräulein Schneider; Jack Gilford as Herr Schultz, Schneider's Jewish beau; Edward Winter as the Nazi Ernst; and Peg Murray as the prostitute Fraulein Kost. New Directions Publishing Company - Goodbye to Berlin Goodbye to Berlin Sally Bowles took center stage in the book's musical adaptation, Cabaret, but the theatrical version can't match the power and richness of the original.

—Time (100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th-Century) A classic of 20th-century fiction, "Goodbye to Berlin" inspired the Oscar-winning film "Cabaret" Goodbye to Berlin Christopher Isherwood First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy with its mobs and millionaires. The shadow of Hitler looms menacingly, towering higher and higher. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles; plump Fraülein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Büste to relieve heart palpitations; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling with their relationship; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family the Landauers.

published September 27th, 2012 Cabaret Costume Rentals Home → Cabaret Costume Rentals Cabaret Cabaret: Kander and Ebb's tony winning 1966 musical watches the rise of the Nazi Party in 1931 from the underbelly of Berlin society. Based on John Van Druten's play I am a Camera, which in turn is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin, the musical revolves around a seedy nightclub whose Master of Ceremonies narrates the show. Writer Cliff Bradshaw befriends Ernst Ludwig on the train to Berlin, who finds the young Englishman a room and introduces him to the Kit Kat Club. On his second day boarding with Fraulein Schneider, one of the club's performers, a young expatriate named Sally Bowles, announces that she is moving in with Cliff. The two develop a romance as their landlady slowly opens up to the love of elderly greengrocer Herr Schultz. Cliff accepts a job from Ernst traveling as a courier to Paris.

When Ernst arrives at Fraulein Schneider and Herr Shultz's engagement party wearing a Nazi armband and threatens Herr Shultz, Cliff realizes his complicity in the growing unrest around them. The rising political tensions break apart both couples as Sally, insisting that their lifestyle is not at risk, refuses to move out of Germany and Fraulein Schneider, convinced that marrying a Jew will put them both at risk, breaks off her engagement to Herr Shultz. Cliff leaves for Paris alone and heartbroken, starting his novel with reflections on the Germany he is leaving. Berlin through the eyes of Christopher Isherwood - BBC News BBC News Berlin through the eyes of Christopher Isherwood By Vincent Dowd Witness programme, BBC World Service 19 March 2011 Close share panel Image caption The musical Cabaret helped evoke a crucial period in European history A new BBC film dramatises the adventures in 1930s Berlin of the English novelist Christopher Isherwood. Earlier adaptations of his Berlin stories, including the musical Cabaret, helped shape the popular idea of what Berlin was like as the Nazi-era loomed. But how true to life have these versions been? Christopher Isherwood arrived in Berlin in 1929.

He had recently abandoned his medical training in London and had published a not very successful novel. At 24, he knew he needed a new direction - and by the time he left Germany in 1933, he had found the material to make his name as a writer. Image caption Isherwood (left) went to Germany to be with his friend, poet and essayist WH Auden His semi-autobiographical stories of pre-Hitler Berlin have been influential, firstly on the page and then reworked by others as a play, a stage musical and on screen. Isherwood went to Germany to be with his friend, the poet WH Auden. The two young men, both gay, were seeking intellectual stimulus but they also hoped for more physical diversion. As Isherwood recalled much later: "To Christopher, Berlin meant boys." "Auden's father had offered to pay for his son to have what we would now call a gap year. He chose Berlin, I think, because of the sexual atmosphere," says Professor Norman Page, who has written a book about the two writers' time in Berlin. "No doubt he wrote excited and exciting letters to Isherwood urging him to join him.

Auden went home but Isherwood stayed almost four years and never really lived in Britain again." Inspiration from life Christopher Isherwood was planning a long novel about Berlin life to be called The Lost. "But as a writer he was a sprinter, not a long distance runner," says Professor Page. Auden chose Berlin, I think, because of the sexual atmosphere Professor Norman Page So Isherwood published two short works based on his Berlin adventures and acquaintances. In 1935 came Mr Norris Changes Trains and then Goodbye to Berlin in 1939. The same year he moved permanently to America, where he died in 1986. He had mined his own life for inspiration more than most writers dare, as the 2009 film A Single Man, directed by Tom Ford, showed. But the afterlife of his Berlin stories has been extraordinary: it is hard to think of another writer whose take on a specific time and place proved so definitive. In 1951 John van Druten wrote a play based on the stories called I am a Camera. His challenge was to find the dramatic focus. In the 1930s, Isherwood couldn't write openly about his own homosexuality.

So the original stories are linked by a narrator who is always slightly out of focus, with readers left to draw their own conclusions. The most famous line is: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." 80 years of Sally Bowles 1931 - Christopher Isherwood meets Jean Ross in Berlin 1937 - Isherwood publishes the Sally Bowles story. Later he explains that Jean Ross had been the model for the character 1951 - I am a Camera opens on Broadway.

The first stage Sally Bowles is the American actress Julie Harris 1955 - I am a Camera is filmed, again with Julie Harris as Sally 1966 - The hit musical Cabaret opens on Broadway with little-known English actress Jill Haworth as Sally 1972 - Liza Minnelli (pictured) wins an Oscar for her performance as Sally Bowles in the Bob Fosse movie version 1993 - Director Sam Mendes revives the show successfully in London and later in NY 2011 - Film adaptation of Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood's attempt to write a more truthful account of his Berlin years But 20 years after Isherwood's Berlin adventures, the stage play is less honest about his sexuality than the originals had been. A suddenly heterosexual Isherwood has a relationship with nightclub singer Sally Bowles. In real life there had, of course, been no such affair but Isherwood explained there had been a real Sally Bowles, a young Englishwoman in Berlin called Jean Ross. As he wrote her, Sally's main talent is for snaring wealthy older men. Jean Ross died in 1973 having said little about being used as the model.

In reality, Ross was a political radical who went on to have a relationship with the author Claud Cockburn. Broadway hit His son, Alexander Cockburn, knew her much later. "Jean was a wonderful woman, warm and gentle in demeanour. She couldn't have been more unlike the rather tinny character portrayed in Sally Bowles. She was extremely intelligent, politically alert and vital. She probably found the portrait painted by Isherwood rather irritating." Ross may have been annoyed at Isherwood's invention but the success of Jan Van Druten's 1951 Broadway play I am a Camera (filmed in 1955) meant the writer was now losing control of his own creations. Later he said the regular arrival of cheques soothed his wounded self-regard. In 1966, the play became the hit musical Cabaret. Six years later came Bob Fosse's massively successful movie version, starring Liza Minnelli. Image caption Cabarets were popular in pre-Nazi Berlin Professor Norman Page says by this time little resemblance remained to the "real" Sally Bowles. "In fact near the end of his life Isherwood admitted he couldn't really remember what Jean Ross had been like.

The memories had been overlaid by all the actresses who played her various reincarnations," he says. But, he says: "In all their different versions his stories and characters evoke a crucial period in European history - even if what we learn about the realities of '30s Berlin is quite limited. His picture is rather sanitised - Berlin was a place of great hardship and suffering but you don't see much of that." Professor Page says changing literary taste will keep the stories alive. "Isherwood operates in an area which has become more interesting to us in recent years: the frontiers of fiction and autobiography and the whole nature of truth-telling in fiction." Forty years after leaving Berlin, Isherwood revisited the territory again not as fiction but in his memoirs Christopher and His Kind. "It was the '70s and the whole public atmosphere had changed," says Norman Page. "He could come clean." The city Isherwood wrote about always had an element of invention. But even now when we imagine the Berlin of the early 1930s, part of what we see is Christopher Isherwood's Berlin. Christopher and His Kind is on BBC2 on Saturday 19th March at 21.30

Question: Which musical was an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin"?
Answer: Cabaret